Author: Blazingcatfur

The floodgates of military aid for Ukraine appeared to burst open this week as European countries lined up to announce the delivery of tens of thousands of rockets aimed at striking Russian tanks and helicopters, along with other critical supplies.

Western officials insist that the shipments aren’t too late to influence the fight against the 150,000-plus Russian troops pushing toward Kyiv and other major cities, though the routes to get the weapons into the country are few, and increasingly perilous.

NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg announced on Friday that Russian forces have used cluster bombs in Ukraine. “We have seen the use of cluster bombs and we have seen reports of use of other types of weapons which would be in violation of international law,” Stoltenberg said, adding that NATO is “collecting information and monitoring very closely what is going on in Ukraine.” Stoltenberg’s statement comes on the heels of accusations, leveled by Ukraine’s ambassador to the United States, Oksana Markarova, that Russia has deployed and used thermobaric weapons in Ukraine. Also referred to as “vacuum bombs,” these weapons suck up surrounding oxygen to trigger a huge explosion. The employment of such weapons is widely condemned by international human rights organizations and could be classified as a war crime if used against civilian populations. Earlier this week, the International Criminal Court (ICC) announced a war crimes investigation into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Karim Khan, the chief prosecutor for the international criminal court (ICC), said an “advanced team” of investigators is already traveling to Ukraine, adding that the work will begin as soon as possible.

O sultan, Turkish devil and damned devil’s kith and kin, secretary to Lucifer himself. What the devil kind of knight are thou, that canst not slay a hedgehog with your naked arse? The devil shits, and your army eats. Thou shalt not, thou son of a whore, make subjects of Christian sons. We have no fear of your army; by land and by sea we will battle with thee. F*ck thy mother.

And Joe Biden’s State of the Union pitch to lower drug prices won’t change that.

It took Russia’s naked aggression against Ukraine for Germany to admit that Donald Trump was right all along: Europe needs to stop relying on U.S. subsidies and spend more on its own defense.

In a stunning policy reversal, Chancellor Olaf Scholz announced that Germany would do what Trump was long urging and commit at least two percent of GDP to defense spending.

Poland is behaving like a humanitarian superpower — yet large parts of the media would rather just cry racism

There are already a hell of a lot of foreign correspondents and human-rights workers at the Ukrainian-Polish border — an immigration problem all by themselves, perhaps.

Quite a few of these reporters seem to be desperately seeking “racism” stories, since that is increasingly the only news which the English-speaking media seems able to process. The heart-warming scenes of Ukrainian women and children being given shelter isn’t the story. Because those refugees are white.

“How can they think we would fight for Ukraine, we are not Ukrainians, we are Black.” pic.twitter.com/TfjQ6yrlOx

— Boosh (@booshie124) March 5, 2022

ROME (AP) — The head of the Polish bishops’ conference has done what Pope Francis has so far avoided doing: He publicly condemned Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and urged the head of the Russian Orthodox Church to use his influence with Vladimir Putin to demand an end to the war and for Russian soldiers to stand down.

“The time will come to settle these crimes, including before the international courts,” Archbishop Stanislaw Gądecki warned in his March 2 letter to Patriarch Kirill. “However, even if someone manages to avoid this human justice, there is a tribunal that cannot be avoided.”

Over the past week or so, earth-shaking events appeared to be occurring every day: the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the dramatic and almost instantaneous determination of Germany to rearm, the imposition of relatively serious sanctions upon Russia and the international condemnation of that country, and the extraordinary bravery of the Ukrainian people and the eloquence, and charismatic leadership qualities, of their president, the formerly somewhat whimsically regarded ex-comedian Volodymyr Zelenskyy. The world appears to be at a turning point between a decline in western, and particularly American, influence and a galvanizing resurgence of the importance and compelling motivating power of human liberty and national patriotism.

The savage Russian invasion of Ukraine has called a distracted and divided world back to the basics of life and death.

I was born in September 1939, three weeks after Hitler invaded Poland. My earliest memories kick in around the time that the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. They are memories of the home front in World War II: of blackout curtains at night and rationing and my young uncles going off to war, to Anzio, Normandy, Patton’s Third Army. In living room windows in houses up and down Mount Pleasant Street, we saw little flags with white stars or gold stars on them. They meant that a son or brother or husband was in the service (white) or was dead (gold). I remember the front pages of the Washington Post and the Times–Herald and the Evening Star on the day after the bomb fell on Hiroshima; I have the clearest memory of the inky black headlines and of the photograph of an explosion shaped like an immense mushroom against a flawless blue sky.